A U.S. appeals court that specializes in patent disputes said on Monday that it would not review a decision to toss out a common method of calculating damages in patent lawsuits.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had said in January that Microsoft infringed a Uniloc patent to prevent software piracy but also tossed out the popular “25 percent rule,” which assumes that the company licensing a patent is due 25 percent of the value of the product.

Uniloc USA and its Singapore-based parent originally filed suit against Microsoft in 2003, accusing it of infringing a Uniloc patent to prevent unlicensed use of its Windows XP operating system and parts of its Office suite of software products.

“There was a good deal of gnashing of teeth,” he writes, “just two weeks ago when Google was found to have infringed the patents of Bedrock Computer Technologies, Inc. with respect to caching in Linux. In terms of patent judgments, the award was relatively small, just $5 million. But it still raised issues with respect to other developers and users of Linux, many of whom were engaged in related infringement suits brought by Bedrock.

“Well, lo and behold, in the same court in the Eastern District of Texas this week Bedrock lost [PDF] on its infringement claim against Yahoo (related NewsPick), another defendant using exactly the same technology, albeit without executing the Bedrock code.”

Though Webbink’s appointment seems to have been a positive addition, there is a notable downside. As we feared, Groklaw seems to be switching focus more narrowly onto on patents and losing sight of the niche but critical area that is SCO. “Walterbyrd” has told us that “UnXis, Inc[,] Claims to Own The UNIX and UnixWare Trademarks”. He quotes:

“APPLICANT’S REPLY IN SUPPORT OF HIS COMBINED MOTION AND BRIEF TO RESUME OPPOSITION PROCEEDING AND RESET AND EXTEND THE SCHEDULE [...]UnXis, Inc. (‘UnXis’) SCO’s successor, now states it, not X/Open, lawfully owns the UNIX and UnixWare trademarks. SCO just completed the bankruptcy sale of its UNIX…”

Fortunately, it seems extremely unlikely that anything other than FUD will ever come out of this development. Groklaw has done so much to show that SCO (or TSG or UnXis or whatever it chooses to call itself) has no case. We do hope that Groklaw will continue to keep an eye on SCO in the future though. █

As we reported earlier, the people backing Mono and Moonlight recently lost their jobs at Novell. AttachMSFT was not interested in this bully-breeding project that is designed to popularise and spread patent-infested .NET. We at Techrights of course do not celebrate the fact that these people became unemployed, as we have explained several times before.

As expected, no other existing company or organisation has (at least externally) bothered to adopt Mono either. As a result, the developers have tried to regroup in a new company called Xamarin, which can be seen as a type of post-Ximian order. The founders registered a domain while masking their true identities, just like Microsoft lobbyists (e.g. Zuck/ACT) often do because there is something rogue to hide. It comes as no surprise then that the Mono cultists have apparently set up their private little establishment in Bellevue, Washington, according to whois (whois.net/whois/xamarin.com). Coincidently (or perhaps not so), this city happens to be where a great number of Microsoft executives live. It is even home to a few notable patent trolls including Intellectual Ventures. Why would Xamarin set up here and not Boston or Provo? This situation seems eerily similar to Outercurve needing to pretend that it is isolated from Microsoft [1, 2]. Outercurve even previously had no other than Miguel de Icaza on board. From the Xamarin.com domain’s whois lookup:

We do have some funding to get started and ship our initial products. But we are looking to raise more capital to address the shortcomings…

Larry Goldfarb, a key investor in SCO, once said that Microsoft’s “Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”

In IRC, our reader Chips B. Malroy writes: “Miguel is not saying who is behind the funding if anyone, but we can guess [..]then M$ is still the source of money for Mono/Miguel [...] there is other news links on it, in one Miguel describes “angel funding” as the source [...]”

He quotes this: “The plan was Xamarian, and it already includes angel funding and a “couple of” engineering contracts to keep it afloat before the first products arrive.”